Data centers will be kept out of most of the ACE Basin in Colleton County under a legal settlement announced Oct. 5.
The basin is a 1.6-million-acre watershed formed by the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, and it reaches close to Charleston: one unit of the Ernest F. Hollings ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge lies about 20 miles southwest of the city, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The deal comes as data center proposals spread across South Carolina, The Post and Courier has reported. Closer to home, Google operates a data center campus in Berkeley County, and Mount Pleasant has since paused data center approvals.
The county agreed to create a “Data Center Exclusion Area” covering most of the basin within its borders, including sensitive land along the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers, according to the law center. The zone includes the 850-acre tract at the headwaters of the Ashepoo River where Eagle Rock Partners proposed a data center complex in December 2025, the group said.
The exclusion area covers about 62% of the county, Robby Maynor, a policy advocate with the law center, told The Post and Courier.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit the law center filed in January for two landowners, Jennifer Singleton and Miles Crosby. It challenged zoning changes that allowed data centers in rural parts of the county. About 400 people turned out at a December 2025 zoning board meeting to oppose Eagle Rock’s plan, The Post and Courier reported. The Charlotte-based developer’s proposal called for a $6 billion, 1,000-megawatt campus that would have been South Carolina’s first gigawatt data center, the SC Daily Gazette reported at the time.
“The original data center complex that was proposed would have surrounded my property on three sides and completely changed the area,” Crosby said in a statement released by the law center.
“This historic settlement agreement sets the framework for legislative action that will ensure responsible conservation of natural resources while securing the economic future for citizens of Colleton County,” County Council Chairman Scott Biering said in a statement, ABC News 4 reported.
The exclusion area still has to be written into the county’s comprehensive plan. County staff will refine the map before it goes to the Planning Commission and then County Council, county spokesperson K.C. Campbell told The Post and Courier.
The settlement does not close the county to data centers. In September, council created a “digital infrastructure overlay district” and applied it to a property near the unincorporated community of Smoaks, the paper reported. Eagle Rock has dropped the Walterboro site and settled on one in the northern part of the county, inside the overlay, according to The Post and Courier. Brantley Strickland, executive director of the Colleton County Economic Alliance, told the paper that data center developers are still interested in the county.
